Your marketing deserves to be legendary!
Your brand and it’s story crave sharing from one customer to the next. That is the difference between a story and a legend. Think about the brands you admire most; isn’t it because of how those brands make you feel? Isn’t it the way you “flow” through their delightful customer experience?
Amazon.com is of those brands, even if they can’t seem to make a profit. Jeff Bezos is quoted, in the Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon as saying – “Amazon is not in the business of selling books, but in the business of helping customers buy books.”
How often have you heard people tell you about a “remarkable” experience they have had with Amazon? I like to tell a story about the time I ordered the wrong back-up hard drive. As soon as I noticed that my new MacBook Pro didn’t have a firewire connection I requested the label to return it then printed it out. Of course, the hard drive and the label sat in my office for a couple of weeks waiting for me to drop the package for return at the UPS store. The day I finally took it to the UPS store and they scanned the package into their system, Amazon immediately gave me full credit for the return on my credit card. They exceeded my expectations and made this experience remarkable. Experiences like this are par for the course for Amazon, but why?
A great brand like Amazon today is customer centric, data driven, but managed by narrative. The story matters. Telling your story is great but when you can consistently deliver great customer experiences that you can both manage & measure you win. When everyone in your organization from stockroom to boardroom is aligned with the story you tell, then you have managed to turn your story into a legend. That is the point when marketing promotions are no longer driving your growth but customer sharing drives your growth.
“The balance of power is shifting toward consumers and away from companies… The right way to respond to this if you are a company is to put the vast majority of your energy, attention, and dollars into building a great product or service and put a smaller amount into shouting about it, marketing it.” Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon.com
Amazon is well known for their use of data. Did you know that at every meeting there is an empty chair representing the customer and that no PowerPoints are allowed at meetings? Did you know that you cannot show up with PowerPoint slides to those meeting? Everyone must present a 5-6 page narrative about the topic you want the meeting to be about. Also if you want to release a new product a press release from the point of your customer has to be written before a single line of code is written.
Want to create a legend? You can start small but you need to develop into a company that is customer centric, data driven, but managed by narrative.
We want to help you and that is why we just published a ~46 page Kindle book titled “Buyer Legends: The Executive Storyteller’s Guide.” Your entire investment is $2.99 and it takes less than an hour to read. Once read you’ll be able to implement the Buyer Legends process for the first time in about 90 minutes. Please get your copy today and tell us how you plan to become a legend.
PS At the end of the book we provide you with one of the copis of the Buyer Legends we used to create our book. You can get your copy of that Buyer legend on the resources page on BuyerLegends.com. We will also be blogging over at BuyerLegends.com/Blog.
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